1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to data mining within a message handling system.
2. Related Art
Data mining is being increasingly used for developing business strategies and solving business problems. Data mining is a technique that can intelligently and automatically transform data into useful information. Data mining searches for relationships and global patterns that exist in the data comprised by one or more databases. Data mining determines from modeling the data in the one or more databases potentially useful information (e.g., rules, constraints, correlations, patterns, signatures and irregularities). Data mining provides prediction and description. Prediction involves using variables or fields in the one or more databases to predict unknown or future values of other variables of interest. Description focuses on finding interpretable patterns that describe the data in the one or more databases. The relative importance of prediction and description for particular data mining applications may vary among different applications.
A data mining method may analyze customer transactions for patterns or association rules which help make business decisions (e.g., choose sale items, design coupons, arrange shelves, etc.). For example, data mining can be performed by a company relative to its customer database to determine, based on customer data stored in the database, which customers are most likely to be good candidates for a new product, and focus marketing efforts on these customers. Data mining may determine whether to market the new product to the customer.
Unfortunately current usage of data mining is inefficient for accommodating new data to which data mining algorithms are applied and for distributing the results of data mining calculations. Thus, there is a need for a method and system characterized by improved efficiency for accommodating new data to which data mining algorithms are applied and/or for distributing the results of data mining calculations, as compared with usage of data mining in the related art.